[buug] Backups [Was: Trapped in Upgrade Hell]
Rick Moen
rick at linuxmafia.com
Mon Mar 8 19:45:45 PST 2004
Quoting Ian Zimmerman (itz at buug.org):
> I agree, especially as I am trying to find a way to back up my new
> machine. I had a 4G DAT2 drive in the old one, it worked perfectly
> and saved my a**e many times. But the new disc drive is 60G ...
What's cost-effective depends (obviously) on how much data one has to
deal with per backup set, among other things -- but, these days, if I
were buying a tape drive for home use, I'd be looking for a used DDS4
drive.
It writes very, very quickly to either DDS4 or DDS3 tapes. Use the
former for high capacity and the latter for inexpensive media.
Capacities before compression:
DDS4: 20 GB
DDS3: 12 GB
When weighing alternatives, make sure you include to cost of media for a
reasonable number of backup sets for a couple of years. One such scheme
I worked out requires 30 tapes for each year, and is detailed in my
"Backup Fallacies / Pitfalls" piece (referred to earlier). When you
include cost of a _serious_ number of rotational backup sets, DDS
tends to look very attractive, relative to all alternatives.
More information about the buug
mailing list